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People used to write letters to each other. By hand. With a pen. And paper. Whoa.

People used to write letters to each other. By hand. With a pen. And paper. Whoa.

It’s how we got to know each other.

I’m buried in letters.

It seems that before email and texting and smartphones, the way we communicated was through writing letters.

It wasn’t just love letters from girlfriends, but 17-year-old boys who are just writing to their friends to keep in touch and let them know what’s going on in their lives.

Sure, there were telephones, of course, but based on the sheer volume of letters I have now uncovered in my attic, we wrote a lot.

My mother told me about a group called marriage encounter. An organization that worked marriages. From what I gather, all they did with white letters to each other. in fact, they had getaway weekends where they just wrote letters to each other even though there.

At this moment, I’m dictating into a microphone and the text magically appears on my laptop screen.  The thought of pen and paper and envelopes and stamps and mailboxes and weeks in between is as long past as horse and buggies.

How do we communicate today? We talk, we text, we meet in person.

But, yes I’m biased, yes I’m a writer, yes I even enjoy writing, the act of writing, especially with pen and paper is just a different form of communication than these others. It’s deeper, it pulls from somewhere inside of us that we can only access through that method.

Maybe this is why I still write these days. Not with pen and paper. I’ve also now switched from dictation to typing as it just feels better. But writing pulls it out from where no other method can.

Here’s a photo of one of the mountains of letters from the past. What will the photos of my kids be like when they clean out their attic in a few decades? What does your attic look like?

People used to write letters to each other. By hand. With a pen. And paper. Whoa.

People used to write letters to each other. By hand. With a pen. And paper. Whoa.

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